Emojis

Sometimes words aren’t enough, and that’s where emojis come in. But even then, there are times you just can’t find the perfect little pictograph that encapsulates your exact mood. Even the slightly more expressive kaomoji can fail you when you need them most. Read More >>

You'd be forgiven for missing it in the maelstrom of information about the Galaxy S9 yesterday — not to mention the general influx of phone news from MWC — but Samsung has launched its own rival to Apple's Animoji, and it's a positive development for diversity and inclusion in tech. Read More >>

Emoji 11.0 is fixed and prepped for delivery in June. Some of them look promising—useful even. But Anthony Hawk, long-time purveyor of fine video games, has taken umbrage with the Unicode Consortium’s depiction of his stock in trade. He’s also been given the opportunity to fix it. Read More >>

Great news: On Wednesday, the Unicode Consortium released the final version of its 11.0 emoji set, with approximately 77 new emojis being added to the list. There’s a lot of new content, including a few new faces, various organs or body parts, animals, foodstuffs, and science equipment including petri dishes and lab coats. Read More >>

Newly proposed guidelines under consideration by the Unicode Consortium, the non-profit group that maintains Unicode as the international standard for symbols across software platforms, could soon radically change the way we use emojis. Yes, I mean that Unicode may finally update emoji standards to let your favourite symbols face either direction instead of just one way. Read More >>

We’ve got more emojis at our fingertips than ever before, but are your friends, relatives, colleagues, and favourite chatbots seeing the colourful cartoon symbols you think they’re seeing? There are several different reasons why emojis can get lost in translation between apps, devices, and platforms, and here we’ll explain how to stop it from happening. Read More >>

Once, emoji were just emoji. Now they're another way for businesses to look into our souls—er, feeds—and see if we might like to buy something. Twitter is rolling out a new feature that lets advertisers target people who have tweeted a specific emoji. Read More >>

We have no way of knowing why Facebook rejected the “Yay” button. But it’s kind of funny because “Yay” is, apparently, slang for cocaine! Realistically, however, the world probably won’t be getting a “Yay” button because joy is confusing. Read More >>

Eric Andrew Lewis works as a web developer at The New York Times, but in his spare time he likes to find ways to make it hard for people to get any work done on a Wednesday afternoon. That’s why he created this simple online tool that turns any photo into a colourful mosaic of emojis. Read More >>

The workplace messaging platform Slack has prided itself on sassy design: a cute logo that animates into a bursts of colours as it loads, a screen that reshuffles like a deck of cards when you change teams. Fine. But now, Slack is outdoing itself, and emojifying the crap out of its chat interface. We don’t need this. Read More >>

Is there a difference between "Yep" and "Yep :)" when you chat online? Seems like an odd quibble to focus on during the biggest drug trial of the decade, but it's not trivial. The meaning of internet-speak cuts to the heart of the Silk Road trial. Read More >>